In the early days of the HTML5 movement, I wrote the first major cross-browser compatibility shim for HTML5 and tags. It was called html5media.js. At the time, I assumed that the shim would be obsolete within a few years, just as soon as major browsers adopted a common standard and video codec. Unfortunately, the shim is still used by hundreds of thousands of people each day, and embedding video is just as confusing as ever.